Two little words

Wednesday

Mar 19, 2014 at 10:13 PMMar 20, 2014 at 11:26 PM

Last week I was getting some body work on account of a spine that in the past few years has started to feel like one of those twisty drinking straws kids will beg you to buy, use once and forget about.Only of course you can never forget about your back, since you use it every day, along with the muscles in your core that hold it up.There I was, prone on this massage therapistís table, my face pressed into that padded doughnut-looking thing they have at one end.I was doing my best to get through the part where they use the tip of an elbow to press the living daylights out of your calf muscles Ė since, as they explain, everything is connected to everything else in the body and if you want to "open" the tissues higher up, you have to start by undoing any kinks closer to the floor."Breathe through the pain," she had just said to me and God knows I was trying to.Then, just as she was walking around me to get at my other leg, she asked what I did for work. Americans are always asking each other that, I donít know why."I write," I said in a voice muffled by the foam of the face cradle. "A column," I managed to add. "For various newspapers."She started in on my other calf and as the lights inside my head began to dim and billow with that point-of-the-elbow move, she went on."What do you write ABOUT?""Oh I donít know," I squeaked. "Our common life I guess. Itís mostly observational. Sometimes itís funny," I added.Thatís when she asked the question that leads me to bring you into this sacred-seeming room with its soft music and healing oils in the first place: "So what is your writing like? Is it cynical and sarcastic?"Puzzled by the question, I stayed silent for a beat. "Oh not at all!" I finally blurted."Because I mean I can be pretty sarcastic myself," she said.Cynical and sarcastic.The words kept echoing in my ears. In all the interacting and people-watching I have done in the course of my career I have never seen anything that would prompt me to write in a cynical or sarcastic fashion. In fact, 99 percent of the time what I see is either funny, uplifting, heartening or all three.Hereís an example: This week in Starbucks I got a free coffee because, as the barista told me, the man in the blue shirt by the windows had told him that he wanted to pay for the beverages of the next 10 people to walk in the door.And hereís another: I sent a skirt back to the J. Peterman catalog people asking for a refund, since, as I said in the "Reasons" section, it seemed quite ill-made.Then, not four days later, a fresh J. Peterman box arrived holding two precious-to-me documents, which I had inadvertently enclosed in the box with the poorly made skirt. No note accompanied these documents, no scrawled first name on the "Packed by" card you sometimes see. More importantly, no charge was posted to my credit card, then or ever.Someone in the shipping room had lifted out the skirt, seen the photo of the 14-year-old Brooklyn boy and the citation, done in gorgeous calligraphy, awarded to him four years later, and understood. He or she then wrapped it in fresh tissue paper, tied it with a length of wide cream-colored tissue ribbon and sent it right back to me.So I ask you and I really do wonder: In a world with such generosity and kindness, how can anyone, ever, speak cynically and sarcastically?Terry Marotta is a syndicated columnist who lives in Winchester. Write to her at terrymarotta@verizon.net or visit her blog Exit Only at terrymarotta.wordpress.com.